Act of Betrayal

by Shirley Kennett

  “I’ll come,” Thomas said.

  It was seven-thirty Saturday morning. She and Thomas ate breakfast at Millie’s Diner. Fortunately, Millie wasn’t there. PJ didn’t want to explain, and Millie would have immediately picked up that something was wrong.

  It was an odd experience sitting at the counter with her son, not with Schultz. The wobbly stool stood between them, and they shared breakfast and talked like adults. It was going to take a lot of getting used to, but PJ had decided to take Thomas up on his challenge. Teenagers definitely needed limits and guidance, but the past few hours had been an eye-opener about Thomas’s level of maturity. She had a lot of catching up to do—he’d outpaced her expectations.

  She offered to drop him off at home for a few hours’ sleep, but he wanted to stay with her. So she took him to the headquarters building and got him a visitor’s pass. It was only the second time she’d taken him to her office. The first time was when he helped paint the walls, turning a sickly green utility room into a fresh white office.

  He eyed her Silicon Graphics workstation, a benefit of the grant that had set CHIP in motion in the first place. She was sure he’d love to get his proficient hands on it. She tucked him into a corner of her tiny office with the morning St. Louis Post-Dispatch and angled the monitor away from his line of sight.

  She called Lieutenant Wall and asked about locating Darla.

  “No progress,” he said. “There was distraction with the situation last night. But I’ve had someone on it since I listened to that tape you made at Libby’s house. Asked the FBI for help after Judge Canton was killed. Nothing there yet, but they’ve only had the basic info for a few hours.”

  “That’s what I thought,” PJ said. “Darla really wanted to take herself out of things. She might have hired a professional to help her disappear. What’s she running from, anyway? Embarrassment about her family? The media?”

  “Seems to me like she’s afraid of something,” Wall said. “Or someone.”

  When she got off the phone, PJ hesitated for some time before making a dial-up connection with her computer. She wasn’t at all sure what she was about to do was right. But it was necessary.

  What’s the buzz, Keypunch?

  Merlin, I need to get in touch with someone, she typed without preamble.

  Have you tried the social chats? Maybe you’ll meet someone with common interests. Although in your case, I doubt it.

  Knock it off, funny man. This is important.

  I see. Go ahead.

  I want to talk to Cracker.

  There was a long pause, as she’d expected. Cracker was the screen name of a computer genius she’d encountered in one of her earlier cases. He was extremely resourceful, and highly skilled at breaking into supposedly secure systems. He sifted information through his fingers and came up with answers, and he did it for money.

  Cracker was also a killer.

  He never did the dirty work himself. He worked through machines whenever possible, through people when he couldn’t find a computerized way to kill.

  He had taken a liking to PJ, seeing her as a skilled adversary—one who wasn’t up to his level, but few were.

  Merlin finally responded. I don’t know who Cracker is.

  She wondered if that was completely true. Cracker had told her that Merlin was their link, that Merlin knew him, but in an unexpected way. Merlin could well have figured out the connection by now.

  This is no time for games, PJ typed. This could be life or death, Merlin. Schultz’s life, and maybe others.

  I don’t know who Cracker is.

  He broke his connection. It was the first time in their lengthy relationship that Merlin had gotten genuinely angry with her, with something she implied. She waited tensely in the private chat room, worrying about the morality of what she was trying to do: bargain with one killer to catch another. Finally she shook her head. She’d have to sort it all out later. There wasn’t time to deal with it now.

  Merlin rejoined her after ten minutes.

  All I can do is broadcast a message to everyone I know and hope he sees it or that it’s passed along to him.

  Then that’s what I want you to do. Tell him Lucky Penny needs to talk to him.

  Your wish is my command.

  He disconnected again. PJ couldn’t tell if his last remark was sarcastic or his usual brand of weird humor. She hoped their relationship wasn’t damaged beyond hope. She knew she was intruding on his very private existence by making that request. The fact that he hadn’t given her the customary list before signoff was an indication of his emotional state.

  Add another loss to the week’s total, she thought.

  PJ looked over at Thomas. He was sitting at the small table that held her coffee machine, and he’d fallen asleep with his head down on the newspaper. He wanted to stand by her, and he couldn’t even stay awake. Poor kid.

  Poor young man, she amended.

  She wanted to fix herself some coffee, but that would wake him. She left him there, gently snoring, and went to work on a virtual reality simulation of the Eleanor Ramsey murder. She spread the file photos out on her desk and selected some for the scanner. Then she set about designing the Ramsey home in the computer, quickly sketching in Libby Ramsey’s path from the front door to the bedroom where she found the girl’s body. Rooms that weren’t entered by Libby were stubbed for later development. The final step was to add details from the police report and the postmortem exam concerning the condition of the scene and the victim, so that the computer could make the simulation consistent with reality.

  The phone remained quiet while she worked. Everyone else was busy with their own tasks aimed at finding and stopping the killer. At about eleven o’clock, she called the hospital and spoke to Anita. She got the depressing news that Dave hadn’t awakened yet from the anesthetic. His doctor was probably thinking coma, although no one wanted to say the word and make it that much more real. Melissa was a real trooper, and had faith that he would wake up soon. She said he always did sleep late whenever he got the chance.

  PJ was ready for a run-through on her simulation. She decided to skip the preliminaries and go directly to immersion, although she knew the experience wouldn’t be fully realized at such an early point in her work.

  She closed her office door. She always did when she used immersion, because she had a tendency to wander around the room, to move in reality as well as in virtual reality. She pulled on the data gloves. They felt like a light metal mesh, and picked up the movements of her hands. She could perform actions in the virtual world by tapping one finger against the palm of the other hand to move in the direction she was looking, or clenching her fingers to pick something up. The gloves felt cool against her skin, but after a time she wouldn’t notice their presence.

  Next she put on the Head-Mounted Display, or HMD. It wasn’t a sleek commercial style. She had obtained both the gloves and the HMD on loan from Mike Wolf, her friend and a researcher in virtual reality at Washington University. She had put in for a requisition for a purchase of her own peripheral devices, but the items were expensive and hadn’t yet found a place in the department budget. She was new enough to the department to still have a shred of hope for eventual approval. The pieces of equipment she got from Mike were considered spares, replacements to be used in case of malfunction of the primary items used in his research. One of these days he was going to ask for the items back. When that happened, PJ would have to find another “donation” or CHIP would go without. A VR team without immersion capability wasn’t exactly working on the cutting edge.

  The HMD looked like a mad scientist’s helmet from an old B movie, but it worked. She lowered it onto her head and gave her eyes a few minutes to adjust to the blue screens. In a couple of minutes, her whole world would narrow to what those two screens presented to her. The HMD blocked out input from the outside world. Vision was totally restricted to the screens, and hearing somewhat restricted to the foam speakers that cradled her ears inside the h
elmet. If someone were to come up and shout near her head, she might react to it, but ordinary room noises were blocked out.

  The blue screens were actually small computer monitors a few inches from her eyes. Each monitor would present a scene to one eye, angled from the view in the other monitor, the same angle at which light naturally fell on a pair of human retinas, which were about four inches apart. The result was similar to a moving, life-size ViewMaster scene. After a short period of adaptation, she found it easy to accept the world as real because everywhere she turned her head—slowly, unless she wanted to blur everything—another part of the world was revealed, just as in real life. In virtual reality, though, the only portions of the world that existed were the ones she was looking at. When she turned her head, the old images were swapped out of memory. The computer was fast enough, and had enough memory, to make the swapping out almost seamless, so that there was minimal jerkiness to the motion.

  PJ closed her eyes, pressed a function key on her keyboard, and waited a few seconds. She preferred to have the setup done while she wasn’t looking.

  Opening her eyes, she found herself standing in daylight outside the Ramsey home. She noticed that her shadow didn’t have its familiar contours, and then she remembered that she’d chosen to play the role of Jeremiah Ramsey. She had a male-shaped shadow, and it was foreshortened close to her body, because the time was a little past noon and the “sun” was high overhead. There was a projection on one side of the shadow that puzzled her, but she put it down to a simulation inaccuracy. At such an early point in the development, she expected to see a lot of those blips.

  In front of her was the brown door from the case file photos. She turned her head, scanning the houses on either side. They were generic-looking, and repeated in patterns of three, because she had not scanned in images of them or developed them individually. The computer had inserted the three basic house images that were available in its database. Actually, the effect wasn’t dissimilar from new subdivisions that had a limited choice of home styles.

  PJ moved forward in the scene by tapping her palm, each tap equivalent to a step. She pushed on the door by extending her hand out into the air in front of her. The data glove picked up the motion and translated it appropriately in the scene. She also tried turning the doorknob, but the door was locked. She reached into her pocket for the key, and that’s when she noticed one of her hands was encumbered. She looked down at her hands and saw that she was carrying a baseball bat in her left hand.

  Of course. The bat.

  Jeremiah had claimed in his early confession that the murder weapon was a bat, and that he’d brought it from home. He couldn’t exactly have put it in his pocket, so he had to carry it openly. And hadn’t his statement said he was riding around on a moped since his car was wrecked? How had he transported the bat? He couldn’t just toss it into the trunk. He would have had to tie the thing on the moped somehow. She couldn’t recall anything on the subject from the case file. Had Schultz deliberately overlooked an incongruent piece of evidence to get a conviction in the case? She tossed that question on the mounting stack of doubts she had about Schultz’s past and his integrity. Would he allow an innocent man to be sentenced to death to restore his own image in the department? She reminded herself that the conviction was reinforced by physical evidence—the blood on Eleanor’s hands that matched Jeremiah’s.

  Instead of opening the door with a key, PJ knocked on the door with the bat. Jeremiah was supposed to be angry about the wreck of his car, so it seemed like a natural thing to do. She had to get into character.

  Eleanor opened the door almost immediately. The girl was done with scanimation—the process of animating a scanned-in image. Her features and body language were brought to life by the computer, so that her face moved when she talked and her body had motor functions. At the moment she was standing with her hands balled on her hips, an arrogant posture. Eleanor was several inches shorter than PJ, which startled PJ until she realized she was looking down on the girl from Jeremiah’s simulated height.

  Jeremiah reached out with his right hand and shoved Eleanor back into the foyer. She glared at him, her computer-generated eyes narrowing to slits, and slipped around him to close the door. She stood with her back to the door.

  “What do you want?” Eleanor said. It came out flatly, as what-do-you-want. PJ would have to work on her voice intonation.

  “You wrecked my car,” Jeremiah responded. PJ kept her “Jeremiah” voice low. She didn’t want to wake Thomas. There was no record of the exact conversation between Eleanor and Jeremiah in the court transcript, so she and the computer were improvising an angry confrontation.

  “It was a rotten piece of shit, anyway,” came the retort. PJ briefly wondered where her computer had learned bad language.

  Must have picked it up from Schultz.

  Eleanor turned her back and strode into the kitchen. Jeremiah followed. PJ noticed that rooms leading off the hallway, rooms that she hadn’t defined yet in the simulation, appeared as black gaps in the wall. It was a little disorienting, but she had been expecting it.

  “I expect you to pay for it,” Jeremiah said when he reached the kitchen.

  “Yeah, sure. I figure it was worth about five bucks.” She reached into a purse on the counter and produced a five-dollar bill.

  Jeremiah shoved her hard against the kitchen counter. The case photos indicated that there may have been a struggle in the kitchen. He advanced on her and raised the baseball bat threateningly. She side-stepped, but swiped her hand along the counter, spilling papers, plastic cups, pill bottles, and the telephone to the floor.

  “I want my money and I want it now. If you don’t have it, I’ll take it out of your hide!” Jeremiah brandished the bat again.

  Eleanor ran past him, heading for the front door. Jeremiah put his foot out and tripped her. She went sprawling on the kitchen floor, knocking her chin hard and turning over a chair with her legs. The kitchen then matched the crime scene photos: overturned chair, items scattered on the floor. Jeremiah went out of the kitchen and locked the front door with a security chain so she couldn’t make a quick exit. By the time he returned to the kitchen, she was gone. He heard her slam the door to her bedroom upstairs.

  Jeremiah went up the stairs. PJ was breathing fast by the time her character got to the upstairs hall. She was caught up in the chase.

  Jeremiah knocked roughly on the door. “Come out of there. You can’t get away with wrecking my car this easily.”

  Eleanor kept him waiting in the hall, getting angrier at being shut out. When she did open the door partway, she had a portable phone in her hand, the one that had been found smashed on the floor at the crime scene.

  “I’m calling the cops. You better get out of here, if you know what’s good for you.”

  Jeremiah slammed his body against the door, sending Eleanor flying backward. The phone was knocked out of her hand and went spinning across the floor. He went over to it and stomped it. There was a satisfying crunch, although it sounded a little like popcorn popping. The simulation had a long way to go.

  “Hey!” Eleanor said. “I bought that phone out of my allowance! You’re going to pay for that.” She rushed toward him.

  Caught unprepared, Jeremiah took quite a beating. Eleanor came at him with her fists clenched, meaning to do harm. She pounded his left shoulder repeatedly, trying to get him to drop the baseball bat. Angrily, Jeremiah pushed her away and swung the bat with both hands, just as he’d swing at a pitch. It caught her in the ribs, and there was a sickening crack.

  PJ, breathing hard and with her heart racing, reached out to stop the simulation at that point. She knew what happened next. Jeremiah struck Eleanor repeatedly with the bat, sending her blood flying in patterns that were telling to those who studied that sort of thing. Then he fled from the house, leaving the front door unlocked behind him.

  Playing the role of killer through to the bitter end was repulsive to her, although she’d do it if she thought
there was something fresh and important to be learned. Whenever possible, she left that to Schultz and others who weren’t fazed by it. Not that it didn’t affect them—she’d seen Schultz’s face after simulations—but they absorbed it better than she did.

  When PJ lifted the HMD off her head, she found herself across the room from the computer, nearly at the limit of the cables that connected the device. Her feet had responded to the VR motion by moving her around.

  Something nagged her about what she had just seen, some inconsistency, but she couldn’t pin it down.

  Thomas was watching her, eyes bright. She knew her face reflected the emotions she’d just experienced in the simulation, and she wondered how much of Jeremiah’s part of the argument Thomas had heard.

  “Can I try that?”

  “No,” she said. Her tone allowed no room for discussion.

  “You got a fax while you were dancing around.”

  “I did?” PJ had gotten exactly three faxes since her machine was installed. Not many people had reason to send directly to her. She had been hoping that no one would notice that fact and reassign the machine. She went over, lifted out the single sheet, and read it.

  Lucky Penny,

  Merlin says you need something. Be at the White Castle off Interstate 44 at Bowles Avenue at 2:00 P.M. And bring something to trade. Information doesn’t come free.

  Cracker

  She sucked in her breath and held it. Her hands shook slightly. It sank in on her what she’d done, and who was on the other end of the fax. She looked for a return phone number or other identification, and found none.

  “What is it, Mom?”

  She started to say it was nothing, then remembered her decision to treat Thomas like a grown-up, at least most of the time.

  “I’ve gotten in touch with a person who might be able to track down more information about the killer,” she said. “About who shot Dave, too. The problem is, he’s a scary guy himself.”